Chapter 3

Back at the cave, we unloaded the wagon and let Linda graze while I went through the armory, trying to figure out what kind of firepower I should carry in the field. I discussed the matter with Eve, and we decided on an RPG for now. However, it looked like we needed to consider what we could make of local materials that would replace the RPG, since we only had 6 of the rockets.

It looked to me like we needed something that could be fired from the crossbow, but had an explosive warhead. No question about it, we had to find the makings of gunpowder as soon as possible. I could cobble up a fuse if we had the gunpowder to go with it. We need saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, and sulfur is going to be the hard one to find. Well, that scare today was enough to make me look real hard for sulfur.

We still had several hours of daylight left, so I took advantage of the light to start work on the new front door. I cut several vertical studs to press-fit into the opening and nailed planks onto the studs in shiplap fashion. I managed to finish one side and start the other side before Eve called me for supper. After supper, I finished up the wall and started on the doors. The doors were built in board-and-batten style and I had them finished, but not hung, before bedtime.

The next morning, Eve helped me to hang the doors using hinges that had been included in the stuff we brought with us. The closure was a simple bar I dropped into supports on the door and the new walls. Once the basic construction was done, I used some steel spikes I had to anchor the walls to the roof and floor of the cave. That wood was so tough, I figured that it would take one of those elephants to break in.

Eve said that she was getting sick of nothing but meat for meals, and she wanted to search for some tubers and greens that we might eat. We had a very good automatic testing lab that could find anything harmful to us in our food, so she wanted to gather some representative samples and test them for safety. I certainly agreed with the idea, but I insisted that we never go anywhere alone until we knew much more about our neighborhood. Lucy was not enough protection, I was going along to cover her with the RPG.

We hitched Linda to the wagon and went out prospecting for food and anything else useful that we could find. We headed down off the mountain, since we wanted to see what the valley was like. We made our way down the trail with surprisingly little difficulty. There was only one place where I had to do some shoveling to clear the road wide enough for the wagon. We were lucky that the trail was not so steep that Linda was going to have any trouble pulling the loaded wagon back up the hill.

We had hardly reached the valley when Eve had us stop while she looked at some leafy plants and something that looked like grain stalks. She collected samples of both and we continued on. We stopped five more times for her to collect leaves and fruit. She also dug a couple of times and came up with possible substitutes for potatoes. She found another possible cereal before she was ready to return home.

She started the test machine as soon as we got home, and we had a couple of prospects ready for taste test by supper time. One of the leafy plants was a possible substitute for lettuce and tasted pretty good. Nobody would ever mistake the taste for lettuce, but the texture and taste were close enough that we could get used to it. Damned if the small fruit wasn't the spitting image of a tomato! All we needed was a grain that would let us make bread, and we would be able to make BLTs.

Two of the other leafy plants turned out to have too much mercury to be safe, and that raised the question of where the hell the mercury was coming from. Both grains were OK, but one tasted like hot pepper, so we weren't going to make bread from it, but it looked like a potential spice. Another safe fruit tasted terrible, I almost said, "tasted like shit," but I have never tasted shit, so I don't know how accurate that might be. Anyway, its flavor suggested a high sulfur content, so my interest was raised by that. Both tubers were safe, so she was planning to have boiled "potatoes" tomorrow night.

I wanted to take a trip on the other side of the waterfall. We had never gone more than a few meters beyond the falls, so that was terra incognita for us. Eve agreed to go with me tomorrow morning after breakfast, so that was what we planned. Unfortunately, we didn't make it because it rained. Actually, I had never before seen such a rain storm! The wind blew toward our cave, so I was glad that we had the new door and wall installed; otherwise, rain and water from the falls would have blown in on us. All of our stuff had been hauled inside the cave by now, so there was nothing that could be harmed by the rain.

I was too impatient to sit still, so I wanted to explore the part of the cave leading off from the kitchen. Eve and I put on our spelunking kit and started out. I had rigged up a string of lights, sort of like Christmas tree lights, from our LEDs so that we could have light as we explored and a guide to bring us safely home.

We walked out 500 meters before we ran out of wire. There was nothing worthy of note in the cavern, but I thought it was interesting that the floor was reasonably flat and unbroken. When we came to the end of the string of lights, I walked a few meters farther and came to a ledge that dropped about three or four meters nearly straight down to a rough and badly twisted floor. Off in the distance, I could see a bit of light, so I knew that we had a back door if we ever really needed it. Somehow, I felt a bit relieved by this knowledge.

We went back, gathering the lights and the wire as we went, and started through the other doorway. We strung out the lights as we had done before and found a series of caverns, some larger and some smaller than the ones we were occupying, but, other than finding another stream, there was nothing special about these chambers. Oh, well, at least we were not bored while we were trapped by the rain storm.

I put the lights back into storage and looked around for something else to do. Seeing how restless I was, Eve suggested that I see if I could convert the stream in our bedroom into a shower and/or a bathtub. Now, there was a practical suggestion, so I got right on it.

The stream came out of the hole in the wall about one meter off the floor and splashed into a pool about 15 centimeters deep. The pool ran through a trench in the floor for nearly three meters before plunging down a hole of considerable depth. We had been using the hole as an indoor toilet, and there had been no odor problem, so we assumed that the hole was very deep.

We had some thick plastic film, about one millimeter thick, that I could use to line a tub if I could work out how to build it. I finally decided that I could cut some wood planks and build something like an old horse trough (watering trough) and line that with plastic. I just needed to figure out how to make a drain.

The final problem was that this was going to be a bath in cold water unless one of us had a brainstorm, but I figured on worrying about that later.

We were able to determine that we had arrived in early spring, so there was still time to plant a crop of at least some of our vegetables, possibly all of them, if I could find enough space. We really wanted to get a stand of corn in and some peas and beans. Tomatoes were next on the list, but I had to get busy. I was not an experienced farmer, but the CDs and DVDs we had for reference should tell me the basics, and I could just learn the rest the hard way.

I broke out the plow and hitched up Linda. We started plowing the flat area on our little plateau, and I managed not to screw up too badly. The rows weren't as straight as a pro would have done, but they looked adequate to me and good enough for a first try. Eve distributed our corn with care and I, with Linda's help, covered it up with what I hoped was fertile soil. We planted less than half of what we had so that we could recover from errors. We did the same with the peas and beans. I admit to babying the tomatoes, because we really had high hopes for them.

Eve and I were concerned about insects to pollinate what we had planted. We had encountered no insects up to now, so we were worried about having them when we needed them. We did have a supply of honey bees, but we were reluctant to take them out of stasis until we were sure that it was safe for them. Eve had stored them in the smallest of the stasis chambers as soon as we broke out of our own "sleep," since we felt that we would have to depend on them for our salvation, and we didn't want to take any chances on them coming to harm. In a pinch, we could hand-pollinate our small garden, but we never could hope to feed a whole civilization by that means.

We had to hope that there were native insects and that they would be interested in our plants. We had not seen any wild flowers, yet, so we did not know how the scheme worked in this era. If the local native plants were all pollinated by the wind and not by insects, which was possible, we could be in real trouble. That was when we would desperately need the honey bees. We had four queens and some associated workers, so we could afford to experiment if we had to, but we were currently hoping for the best with local insects.

I had not given up hope of finding sulfur, and the mercury-tainted plants gave me hope, since mercury and sulfur are sometimes found close together. If we could find an area of hot springs, that would suggest volcanic activity and the presence of sulfur. Well, the only way to know for sure was to look for it. Eve, Lucy, and I were going to have to go sulfur hunting.

Once we were sure that the garden was well started, the three of us set out to climb to the top of our mountain and see what we could see from there. We had been sticking very close to home since we arrived, so we had no idea what we might find even just on the other side of our mountain. Besides our automatic pistols, Eve was armed with a rifle and I carried the RPG.

We went straight up the mountain, not even bothering to look for a trail. This was probably foolish, but we were impatient to get to the top. The mountain was not that rugged, so we were able to get to the top before dark. We looked around, but did not see anything to attract our interest; however, it was already dark in the valleys, so there was not much that we could have seen, in any case.

We spent the night in our tent, and made a careful search after the sun came up. We were adapting to the longer hours of daylight, but we still woke up before dawn, so we had plenty of time for breakfast and to break camp before the sun showed itself. It was a beautiful, clear day, so we had considerable hope of finding something useful if it was there to be found. We still had to wait a couple of hours for the sunlight to hit the bottom of the valleys, but we were sorely disappointed.

Well, we were going to have to do this the hard way. The only way we were going to find sulfur was to go out and search for it. We had been lucky on so many things that we had hoped to be lucky on this, too. Eve drew a sketch map of what we could see from the mountain peak, and we packed up and went home.

Our garden was growing well and looking like a potential success, but there was still no sign of insects. Eve and I discussed the pros and cons until we were sick of the subject, but we finally decided that we had to put out one set of bees. I cobbled together a hive for them, and we put a queen and her workers in it. Only a few hours later, there were bees flying around. They found our garden right away, since I had put the hive box right at the edge of it, and they appeared to be satisfied, because they did not try to fly away. Blossoms started to open on the pea plants, and the bees made a "bee-line" for them.

The beans open up a few days later, and the bees seemed to have the situation under control. Shortly thereafter, the tomato blossoms showed up, and the bees flocked there, too. I didn't know what to expect from the corn, since the plants we had were not hybridized. We had to be able to salvage some kernels to be used for seed next year, so we had to go with an old fashioned variety. But the bees went for the corn, too, when it was ready, so that part of the job was done.

Fortunately, we had only released a small number of bees, so they were able to put aside enough food to last them for the rest of the year. I saw them sending out scouts all over the place, but it looked like they never found another source of flowers. If the bees looked like they were in distress, I was going to shove them back into stasis until next season; we didn't know of anything else that we could do.

The garden went well and we were not troubled by any sort of garden pest at any time during the growing season. Once in a while, a native animal would wander to the garden and sample a leaf, they never touched anything else, and spit it out. Apparently, they did not have the where-with-all to handle the exotic plants in our garden. Thank God! It looked like we were not going to have to fight off the local fauna to protect our vegetable supply.

On the other hand, we still needed meat. Eve and I went on several expeditions to investigate the local animals to see which ones might be worth domesticating. I wished that we had been able to bring a cow with us, since, as it was, Eve was going to be the only source of milk for our children. I desperately wanted to find some way to supplement her milk supply, as I wanted to relieve her of some of the burden. I had in mind that we might be able to puree some portion of a native animal to supply the nutrients normally found in milk. I was not worried about vitamin D, but I didn't know what we could do about the others. Eve and I spent a lot of time working on the problem, and we never did find a complete solution. It looked like we were going to have to get the soy bean plants going sooner than we had expected.

The corn, peas, beans, and tomatoes did wonderfully well. The bees and the lack of natural pests resulted in a bumper crop of all four items, so my first effort at farming had gone well. I was looking forward to planting even more varieties of plants next season.

Linda had dropped her foal, a female, and was doing well. She had no problem with the delivery which made life simpler for all of us. The foal was a delight, and we named her Belinda. Belinda went everywhere Linda went, so she learned early in life what it meant to be a horse on a pioneer farm.

What can I say about Lilith and her kittens. Kittens are always fun, but they do grow up to be cats. They became the terror of the mountain, but they never wandered far, I can't imagine why. I never did find out what they ate, but they almost never ate at home, once they were weaned. I do know that we were never troubled by small varmints, so I assumed that was what they were eating.

Lucy's brood were very helpful as watchdogs. They all learned the trade and were the forbearers of the guard dogs we relish now. They turned out to be excellent at the task of herding the winged pigs that we domesticated into being our main source of meat.